FRANKLY enough, effec­tive teaching comes from effective teachers simply because they are only able to help students learn. If so, what kind of people in the name of Heaven are called effective teachers? In actual fact, effective teachers’ person­al attributes can be categorized into three broad characteristics, namely motivating personality, orientation towards success, and professional demeanour.

In motivating personality, teachers usually possess enthusi­asm for their students and subject matter, warmth and humour, and credibility and trustworthiness. First, teachers’ enthusiasm that promotes student learning helps motivate students by keeping them persistent at tasks and mak­ing them feel more satisfied with their teaching. Enthusiastic teach­ers vary their voices, gestures, and expressions, move around the room from front to back and side to side, and maintain a quick lesson pace that involves expres­sions, move around the room from front to back and side to side and maintain a quick lesson pace in­volving high levels of interaction with students. Second, warmth and humour mostly seem to influ­ence student learning indirectly by promoting an atmosphere that makes students feel free and mo­tivated to participate. Teachers convey warmth as `real’´ people by demonstrating concern for stu­dents’ success and by being open. Humour can be spontaneous or planned. Teachers should be able to laugh at not only their mistakes but also themselves and avoid us­ing sarcasm or teasing students. If overemphasized, warmth and humour actually reduce classroom learning. Thus, they had best be used naturally and sparingly. Thirdly, credibility and trustworthiness create a relaxed, supportive environment in which students trust the teacher to help them succeed. Teachers develop credibility and trustworthiness not through their position or cre­dentials but through open, honest teacher-student interaction. And these two qualities will exist only if students perceive them.

Effective teachers are posi­tive people – they like to be orient­ed towards and optimistic about both their own and their student’s success. Specifically, they have high expectations for success and are encouraging and supportive of students. They tend to believe in their own ability to help every student learn with success. Their expectations appear to influence their behaviour towards students, which in turn affects learning. When teachers expect certain students to fail, they are given to reduce the amount of time and at­tention devoted to those students, thus increasing the likelihood they will be unsuccessful. Even more critical than inaccurate in­itial expectations is the failure to modify these expectations when necessary. Hence, teachers must ensure that every student is suc­cessful most of the time. Students with low academic self-concepts should be successful almost every time until their confidence improves. Those with strong ac­ademic self-concepts will also be successful most of the time, but not quite often. Remediation, which is providing re-teaching when a student does not master the content, is an excellent way to convey high expectations and promote success. Moreover, ef­fective teachers have a sense of genuine respect for students and their individual abilities. Encour­agement and support are most im­portant, especially when students are reluctant to begin new tasks or when they experience difficulty and frustration, in which teach­ers demonstrate encouragement and support by avoiding negative comments, noting improvement – not just perfection, and helping students reach realistic goals.

Lastly, effective teachers ex­hibit a professional but flexible demeanour in the classroom. Businesslike behaviour means the ability to be flexible and adapt­able when necessary, and through an understanding of the subject and pedagogy, learners, which means the ability to be flexible and adaptable when necessary, and through an understanding of the subject, pedagogy, and learn­ers all enhance professional de­meanour. Such teachers focus on providing learning in a vari­ety of ways — they direct class­room activities towards helping students reach the established goals and objectives; they set the importance and seriousness of the subject and goals and con­vey this importance to students; instruction and its activities are deliberate and carefully planned to allow the teacher to be con­cise, thorough and efficient; the classroom and its activities are or­ganized to help students to reach the desired goals. Furthermore, a professional demeanour includes the ability to calmly and effectively adapt to changing classroom cir­cumstances and to `read’´ what is happening in the classroom, the level of student understand­ing and motivation, changes in the classroom environment, and problems with instruction. In case these problems arise, teachers must `flex’´ or adapt their instruc­tion more effectively to reach the fixed goals. After all, teachers who show a professional demeanour are also knowledgeable about their subject, pedagogy, of their subject, pedagogy and students. Knowledge of the subject is most useful when it is integrated with that of pedagogy and learners. Only then can teachers select, plan and implement the most ef­fective instruction.

Of course, it is not always so easy for a teaching person to be­come an effective teacher in this so many teachers’ world. Most effective teachers only state that their instruction will give learning achievement and success to stu­dents for certain. However, some teachers will or will not accept this norm in the teaching-learning pro­cess. For certain teachers, their instruction should boost students’ morale rather than just their les­son completion and accomplish­ment, whereas, for others, their teaching ought to offer the solu­tion to future life problems lead to boosting students’ morale rather than just their lesson completion and accomplishment, whereas, for others, their teaching ought to offer the solution to future life problems only instead of lesson attainment. However, what we had herein better consider is that successful teaching and learning may involve students’ high morale and how to best solve their life problems in the future to some extent. Despite this, some teach­ers are in name only, that is, the main reason why they come to the world of teachers is nothing but earning their living. They do not follow their natural bent of instruction, continuous study, life-long learning or practice. Such teachers will never turn out to be successful teachers or successful teachers in the educational field. Simply and clearly, only effective teachers can do effective teaching and learning. If a person wishes to be an effective teacher in the area of instruction, they must grasp the above-mentioned three points at least as much as possible.